Ohmoy Gourd!

Over the topping: where does Pizza's Valiant-driving delivery boy Pauly Falzoni end, and multicultural enfant terrible Paul Fenech (centre) begin? Below: Paul Nakad as Lebanese lady-killer Sleek in the film - shot after he and its creator had fallen out.

"Reffos", "wogs", "spastics"... Paul Fenech's vision of Australia has something to offend everyone. And yet, with Pizza, he's created SBS's highest-rating local show. Richard Guilliatt meets the maverick of multiculturalism.

The first time I encounter Paul Fenech, on the telephone one weekday afternoon, he suggests we meet at a warehouse in inner Sydney where he is organising the launch party for the new season of his cult TV comedy, Pizza. "You should come along - it's going to be a nightmare," says Fenech enthusiastically. "You'll see the kind of stooges and bums I deal with every day, mate. You'll see the angry and bitter Paul Fenech, jaded by years of dealing with idiots. You might see some violence. It's a circus, mate - I'll be talking to jelly-wrestlers, Elvis impersonators, all sorts of idiots ... We'll probably have a chicken fight." There's a pause. "I hope you're not an animal lover."

The subject of jelly-wrestling - and for the uninitiated, we're talking here about bikini-clad women fighting each other in an inflatable pool filled with goop - is one that has a special place in Paul Fenech's world.

"Have you ever been to the jelly-wrestling? Mate, let me tell you, it's an entertainment festival. You'll see heads that don't exist anywhere outside the confines of the Oxford Tavern in Petersham. There's girls of all different colours sliding around in jelly in front of blokes from every ethnic background. You'll see Muhammad from Lakemba sitting next to Joe Bloggs from Fairfield and Phung Quoc from Blacktown. This is what's happening in Australia, Richard. It's not your white nerdy boys sipping lattes in some hokey cafe in Paddington. This is the real Australia, the true Australia. When I think about it..." suddenly Fenech is having an epiphany, "...the jelly-wrestling audience is Australia."

Paul Fenech likes to talk, and his conversation has the bob-and-weave rhythm of a little bloke who's trained his mouth to get him out of any possible scrape. It's a talent that's come in handy on more than one occasion as he has fought his way through the film and television business. There was that federal police investigation while he was an indigenous filmmaker at the ABC, for instance. And the time he won the Tropfest film prize by posing as a Jewish woman...

But that was years ago, and Fenech today has found his true incarnation as the enfant terrible of multiculturalism. Pizza - a half-hour comedy about a bunch of deranged pizza-delivery guys in western Sydney - is the highest-rating local program on SBS, no small irony when you consider how many tenets of the SBS charter it contravenes every Monday night. Ethnic stereotypes, sexist tit jokes and gratuitous violence are the meat of this show; its cast includes two Lebanese hoods wearing tracksuits emblazoned with images of Uzi machine guns, a bong-smoking Aussie stoner called Davo, a wheelchair-bound "spastic" and a mob of "f...ing Asian reffos". Fenech himself plays Pauly Falzoni, a fast-talking "chocko" hoon who drives a canary yellow 1970 Valiant and is regularly forced by circumstance to beat up an assortment of dwarves, blind people, homosexuals and cops.

Paul Nakad as Lebanese lady-killer Sleek in the film - shot after he and its creator had fallen out.

Were it made by Pauline Hanson's film production company, Pizza would undoubtedly spark an inquiry by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. But Fenech is a Maltese-Aussie boy from Sydney's heavily ethnic inner-west, so he knows about Lebbo blokes ogling women's breasts. And it was his inspired decision - dictated by lack of money - to cast the show largely with amateurs from the very 'burbs in which Pizza is set. So Rob Shehadie, a cousin of one of Fenech's acquaintances, plays Rocky the Lebanese Rambo, and Tahir Bilgic, a juice bar proprietor and stand-up comic from western Sydney, plays the horny, drug-dealing buffoon Habib Halal. Throw in cameo appearances by Kamahl, Tony Barber, Big Kev and Anthony Mundine, and you have Australia's most in-your-face television comedy.

"When I grew up, nothing in the media was like the Australia I saw," says Fenech, whose cherubic face gives little sense of his fierce ambition. "Growing up in the '70s with all these blond pop idols like Leif Garrett, I'd be thinking: 'Where's me? Where's the chocko Leif Garrett?' Most of the people in the media don't get out into the real world," he adds, warming to his favourite theme. "They live in a bracket. For one reason or another, I've always been immersed in that real world."

From rudimentary beginnings - a short demo film shot in a bar for about $250 - Pizza has become a small-scale cultural phenomenon. A spin-off movie, Fat Pizza, was the second-highest grossing film in Australia when it opened in April, eventually pulling in a respectable $3.5 million. In a society polarised between tabloid race-baiting and multicultural platitudes, Pizza's cartoonish ethnotypes - overbearing Italian mamas, macho Leb boys, bogans in flannelette - offer the safety valve of a cheap laugh at everyone's expense.

But enough socioeconomic theorising. Let's get back to the jelly-wrestling.

Paul Fenech's idea for the Pizza launch party was simple enough. Guests would arrive at the warehouse and be greeted by two glamorous transvestites who'd hand them showbags containing fake ecstasy tablets, a glow-stick, a Pizza postcard and a raffle ticket (which would give them the chance to shoot a police officer later in the evening). From there, they would walk past two hot tubs containing tattooed women in bikinis. Further in there'd be a bar, and a full-size wrestling ring in which the night's entertainment would be staged - the stripper, the Michael Jackson impersonator, the Fat Elvis, Vulcan the Dreadlocked Gladiator, Maria Venuti singing When You're Good to Mama... Not to mention a kickboxing fight by Shane & Stewart's Unbelievable World of Inconceivable Pain. The jelly-wrestling would be the piece de resistance.

When I arrive during the mid-afternoon rehearsals, Fenech - dressed in a tight black T-shirt and baggy jeans - is hurling his jockey-sized body off the top rope of the wrestling ring, body-slamming the canvas in preparation for a skit later that evening in which he'll pretend to beat up a couple of stooges from the audience. Fenech trained to be a boxer as a teenager and at 33 he still has a kickboxing workout several days a week in order to maintain "an edge on other people", as he puts it. Physical stunts are part of his duties at Pizza (along with writing, directing, producing and starring), but today he seems unhappy with his exertions.

"It's a bit hokey, mate," he says during a break. "Always looks fake, all that dropping to the canvas. I'd like to see some serious slammin' - I'm looking forward to the kickboxing."

There's a pugnacious quality to Fenech which even he concedes is a by-product of being a wog kid from the wrong side of the tracks. The Pauly Falzoni character could be his id writ large - the put-upon little guy who'll take on anyone (during the course of Fat Pizza, Pauly beats up a dwarf, two heavyweight boxers, a greenie in a Wilderness Koala suit, a window-washer, a cripple, an endangered marsupial and a couple of dozen Ronald McDonald clowns). Fenech is actually married with kids and lives on Sydney's well-to-do North Shore, but he's cagey about such personal details. Where Fenech ends and Pauly begins can be hard to discern.

Like Pizza itself, tonight's launch party will be largely improvised around a series of storyboards Fenech has drawn up in the past few days. Most of the cast appear to have little idea of what they'll be doing until they turn up. Jabba (J. Davis, the cable-TV host who plays Davo) has just discovered he'll be walking around dressed like a giant bong. Johnny Boxer, a goateed former bouncer who plays psychotic pizza shop owner Bobo, walks past casually clutching a stubby and cigarette, his blue shirt unbuttoned to reveal his tattooed torso. Boxer got his first audition after Fenech spotted him ejecting someone from a Kings Cross nightclub.

"There's a bit of Bobo in Paul, believe me," growls Boxer amiably. Given that Bobo regularly carves people up with a chainsaw, it's an intriguing observation. "Paul's that conservative in his life, his family and his job, I think the show's his way of expressing that side of himself," adds Boxer. "Somewhere in his dreams, he'd love to be a hit man."

Pizza is written fast and shot on a shoestring. Fenech can write an episode a day and a movie in a few weeks (he shot Fat Pizza in two months), and he runs his set with military efficiency. "When we ring up a location and they ask where we're going to park the trucks, we tell them, 'There are no trucks,'" says producer Tanith Carroll, as an overhead video screen displays a giant close-up of Annalise Braakensiek's breasts. I wonder how Carroll, a diminutive brunette who used to make earnest documentaries about Aboriginal issues, copes with being immersed in a world of ethnic testosterone. "It is weird," she concedes. "I find myself on the phone saying, 'Hi, I need a stripper who'll go down to a G-string for 150 bucks and four jelly-wrestlers who'll spend five minutes in a spa and then jelly-wrestle for 10 minutes.'"

Conspicuously absent today is Paul Nakad, aka Sleek the Elite, the Sydney rapper who starred in the first two Pizza series. Nakad, who's been performing under the Sleek name since the mid-1990s, attracted a huge following with his Leb lady-killer schtick, but last year he had a major row with Fenech. Nakad won't talk about it, but friends say that as the movie went into production, Fenech tried to claim ownership of the Sleek character. Fenech says that's "bullshit" and that Nakad's ego became a problem. Nakad did appear in the movie, but only after lawyers were called in and his friendship with Fenech irreparably damaged.

"He's not a bad guy," says Fenech, before getting a bit more personal. "What can you say about a Lebanese air-conditioning mechanic who's also a rapper? I mean, there's a problem right there in that description ... I think fame just affected him." In the first episode of the new Pizza series, a Sleek lookalike called Slick gets carved up by Bobo's chainsaw.

"Sleek's popularity was enormous," says Tal Shallak, one of the rapper's business advisers. "I think Fenech had to deal with the fact that the only character he didn't create was the stand-out character."

Fenech admits to being driven by an underdog's sense of being up against people who are better educated and better connected. After high school he went into the army instead of university, and he started at the ABC as a cleaner. There's also the height factor. "Y'know, I'm short," he says, mulling over his own psyche in a cafe one afternoon. "Who knows - maybe it's a short guy thing. The ethnic thing? I dunno."

Away from the Pizza set, Fenech today looks more like an advertising exec, with a neat goatee and a charcoal suit. "For some reason I always had a chip on my shoulder. I think I've always been naturally competitive. I've never liked seeing people with no talent get a break. Not to say I've got a great amount of talent, but I feel that if nothing else, I work as hard as I can."

Of that, there is no doubt. After getting that cleaner's job under an affirmative action program for indigenous Australians (the Aboriginal ancestry, he says, is on his mother's side), Fenech went on to produce hours of arts and indigenous programming without ever being tapped as executive material. In fact, his enterprising spirit got him into a memorable jam in 1992 when he co-founded a non-profit production company, which was then commissioned by his own department at the ABC to produce a Dreamtime animation series. At one stage federal police were called in to investigate this and other matters in the department, although no charges were laid against anyone and Fenech continued working at the ABC for a number of years afterwards.

For most of the 1990s Fenech toiled away trying to sell his ideas while working a variety of TV jobs. He filmed several episodes of a gritty crime series called Crooked, which never went into production. In 1998, he directed his first feature, Somewhere in the Darkness, an uncharacteristically sober tale of an old man and a boy trapped in the rubble of a collapsed shopping centre.

Then came Intolerance, a short film featuring Austen Tayshus as a fascist taxi driver. With typical chutzpah, Fenech entered the film at Tropfest under the name Laura Feinstein, a nice Jewish girl whose answering machine featured Fenech talking in a feminine voice through a napkin. On the night of the awards, Tropfest director John Polson excitedly announced Laura as the first woman to win the top prize, his smile freezing as Fenech stepped up to accept it.

"He did look like a bit of a monkey," concedes Fenech, not sounding too chastened by the memory. By all reports the two men had an angry backstage confrontation and haven't spoken much since. "I was prepared to bash him," says Fenech mildly, "and he did run away with some actress-girlfriend blocking him, but I got over it."

David Webster, a television producer who worked with Fenech for much of the 1990s, describes him as extremely amusing and extremely driven, with a me-against-the-world attitude born from endless knockbacks. Webster believes the brutal discipline of Fenech's year in the army left an indelible impression. "He says he's the man who won't be broken by anybody. His self-discipline is quite amazing ... He'll stop at nothing to get his production executed. He won't back down to anyone, other than those he trusts, which is only a few people."

Fenech is such a workaholic, recalls Webster, that he shot his short comedy film Space Pizza while holidaying in Broome, with his wife operating the camera.

Pizza is not exactly unprecedented, of course - there's a line of ethnic Australian humour that runs from They're a Weird Mob in the 1960s to Nick Giannopoulos's Wogs Out of Work and its spin-offs. What sets Pizza apart is Fenech's eye for the chaotic culture clash of Australian suburbia, his ear for wog-boy vernacular ("tip-top", "ohmoy Gourd!") and his willingness to pillory every sacred interest group from refugees to single mothers. The website for the show includes a public message board which has become a hilariously volatile social laboratory in which Maltese and Serbian migrants swap insults, "skips" and "wogboys" debate the merits of their respective cuisines and a militant Jew posts regular dissertations on Islamic anti-Semitism.

"Mate, it's bizarre," says Fenech, "but the real Australia is not too far from the Pizza Australia. People are pretty extreme. And this is the bottom line with Pizza: once you get outside the polite top 20 per cent of society, there's an extreme mainstream where people live. Road rage, this rage, that rage: everyone's upset about something most of the time. I mean, if someone actually interacts with your show, that says something. I think it's good to stimulate the audience, actually. I like it. I love it when this strange dialogue starts to happen between all these people. 'You Aussie dumb boofta!'

"But the thing about Australia is that nine times out of 10 people aren't actually race-haters. They just wanna have their say. I mean, only in a truly multicultural society could something like Pizza be on air."

By nine, the launch party is packed with the most weirdly disparate crowd ever assembled in one Australian warehouse: journalists, dwarfs, hulking bikers in full regalia, bikini-clad women in stilettos, transvestites, bogans, a man dressed as a bong, Maria Venuti in a leopard-skin pants-suit, a large contingent of young men of Middle Eastern appearance and, here and there, clusters of nervily smiling SBS art-movie appreciators. I find myself talking to producer Carroll and Michael Zarakas, a swarthy car dealer from Wollongong who regularly appears on the show as a hysterical Greek.

Like many people attached to Pizza, Zarakas has an odd habit of talking in character and discussing the show as if Rocky, Habib and Pauly are real people.

"Hey, Tanith, do you want me to whack anyone tonight?" he says suddenly, apropos of nothing. "I'm in the mood to whack someone."

Later on, I'll discover that Fenech instructs his cast to stay in character whenever they're around the media, in order to preserve the show's gonzo verisimilitude. Presumably, he keeps the line between Paul Fenech and Pauly Falzoni blurred for the same reason. I'm relieved to see, however, that tonight's extravaganza really does feature Fat Elvis, Michael Jacksoff, the burlesque artiste Lolita Chase, and Maria Venuti in full voice. By evening's end the inebriated media are cheering the sight of four bikini-clad women clawing and biting one another in a vat full of jelly. And in a heroically tasteless finale, a blindfolded NSW police officer is put up against a target and shot by the actor who plays the "spastic", Leonard.

Sadly, there is no chicken fight. "Mate, the RSPCA had a tip-off," Fenech laments afterwards. "They sent an undercover agent to the party ... But Richard, if you're prepared to go off-the-record, I can take you to a dogfight organised by some friends of mine, any Saturday night. Just let me know."